The train keeps rolling: Hibbs' 4/11

Christ the truck with the NEXT batch of comics will be here in just an hour or two, I best get started writing....

AMERICA'S GOT POWERS #1: It's RISING STARS meets THE HUNGER GAMES!

Though, actually, like the latter example, I had some real problems with the set-up as presented: COULD a society evolve the way they posited?

Here's a factoid for you: there are more dog owners in San Francisco, then families with school age children -- and SF proper doesn't have a high birth rate (I think it is one of the lower in California), with what looks like just about 8k kids born annually in SF county. Since the book posits every child in any state of in utero in SF being born "instantly" and overnight, and with superpowers, we might assume this being 9/12ths of that annual number, or something along the lines of SIX THOUSAND super powered children, all the same age.

So, how do you convince parents and/or the kids to do this for what feels like a few years in the story? Since they were 13 maybe? I don't think it spells it out exactly? Certainly long enough to build a giant stadium that appears to connect to Alcatraz island (!) -- though, really how they do that and not devastate shipping into Oakland, I'm not entirely sure...

I don't know, I think if I'm 13 years old, I'm not so inclined to use my awesome superpowers to fight my peers, actually -- I think we (since what 13 year old doesn't think they know better) use it to set ourselves up for something better. Sure, SOME kids go along with it... but anywhere near the majority?

And even those? When they start using robots with live fire against us?

Jonathan Ross' writing is crisp, and Bryan Hitch's art is as nice as ever, but it would seem to need to be some other check or balance going on here to have even the slightest chance of this working as posited. Ultimately, that breaks my Suspension of Disbelief, and made me think this was merely OK.

SAGA #2:  Well, I liked the second issue here even better than the first one, so that's a good sign. I really liked Alana's willingness to sacrifice her child, rather than giving it over to the freaky topless spider-chick. Yeah, this is VERY GOOD comics, I think.

SECRET SERVICE #1:  Mark Millar is hardly subtle, but I thought the neat class juxtapositions here, coupled with the thinking about government austerity programs and the "super spy" was actually a fairly trenchant piece of social commentary. Doesn't hurt to have Dave Gibbons drawing it, either. VERY GOOD.

Ugh. three books? That's all I have time for, and two of them are only semi-reviews? Sorry... but I need to check in this Baker & Taylor box before the truck arrives with the new Diamond books... more on (I hope) Thursday, getting me more recent...

What did YOU think?

-B